Asking Questions Obviously, the kind of questions the app is designed to answer are visual ones: You see an object and wonder what it is. I posted a couple of photo questions, one of a foreign coin and another of a table utensil (possibly a pickle extractor). I also observed other users' questions asking what a certain plant or toy shown was. Most of the questions and answers I saw didn't require a photo at all, and most of the answers seemed to come from either twitter insiders or tech journalists—to be sure a knowledgeable group, but nevertheless a fairly specialized one. They also tended heavily towards San Francisco-area residents.

One problem with a lot of the answers was that they often contained no expertise at all; people just wanted to put forth any answer they could think of: My pickle extractor was called a forceps, and I saw contradictory advice dispensed for many questions. On the other hand, my coin was identified as Jordanian qaurter-dinar coin by a coworker who was also testing the app.

Many answers are just frivolous: One photo question asks if the eye photographed has pinkeye, and an answer suggested peeing on it ("or is that for something else?" the answerer continued). Though medical questions seem a natural for this app, they're also best left to professionals, as opposed to your social networks. A good many of the questions were just as frivolous as some of the answers "Who's your Daddy?" "What are you supposed to do with this [photo of baby]." There were indeed some good answers—the plant was identified. I didn't write down what it was and, once you swipe the question away, it's gone. Forever. Which limits the app's usefulness, in my opinion.

Answering QuestionsAfter a while, a status line at the bottom of the app told me that four people wanted answers from me. Tapping this line brought up the first question card. If you can answer it, fine, but if you swipe it down, you'll never see the question again. No opportunity for a "Wait! I knew that!" epiphany moment. Most of the questions I saw were from people simply testing the app as I am.

Unlike Yahoo Answers or Quora, you can't search at all on Jelly. Nor can you look through a particular user's set of questions or answers. The app only useful if your contact network can answer your questions, and you theirs. This reduces Jelly's value markedly, and I'd expect people would tire of answering the same question from each individual user who cares to ask it. Why not let us look at previous Q&A's to save creating a new entry? It's too narrow a system.

There was a trend a few years ago for apps and services based on the claim that you're better off getting answers from your contacts than from strangers. This has been pretty well debunked by the non-success of those apps. None of my contacts are brain surgeons, so it wouldn't benefit me to ask any of them about brain surgery. The same could be said for any number of specialties. Services like Yelp, Quora, and Yahoo Answers (though the last does engender a load of flippant worthless replies), are open to the world, where someone who knows about a field but isn't a contact can answer. A lot of these connection-based answer sites and services have long since dropped off the radar. A recent casualty of the genre is Google's Schemer, but there's a long line behind it. There's even a thread on Quora about why these services have failed.

Does Jelly Have Legs?I'm not saying there are no good uses for an app like this; by all means, kick its tires and see if it floats your boat. You may just use it as entertainment to kill some time. In a word, Jelly is the toy du jour for the technorati.

But when I use Jelly, I think "What's the point?" What's the point of having a photograph of a T-shirt with the question, "What T-shirt printing service should I use?" There just aren't that many questions you'd want to ask a group of contacts that require a photo. The majority of questions I saw in the app had no need whatever for an image. And in cases where you do need a picture, you can easily post it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Flickr with the question!

With Jelly, potential answerers are limited to people who meet both criteria of being a social network contact and having the app set up. If the team behind Jelly can ramp up with some new compelling features or setup, the app may be worthwhile in the future. But for now, despite giving it high marks for style, its lack of substance means this is one of those apps I will be uninstalling soon.

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Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of Web Services (pretty much the progenitor of Web 2.0) for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine’s Solutions section, which in those days covered programming techniques as well as tips on using popular office software. Most recently he covered Web...
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